Hegseth, the “Enemies Within” and “Christian Academies"

Christian nationalism--locally inspired and grown.

It is tempting to think of Trump’s cabinet nominations as far away, having relevance only in that “other Washington,” not here in the Inland Northwest. Tempting, but wrong.

Pete Hegseth, Fox “News” commentator and Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, is a Christian Reconstructionist nominated to re-orient the Pentagon from foreign threats toward the “enemies within.” Timothy Snyder, Yale historian of eastern Europe, in his Substack article, Pete Hegseth: The Short Course, brings it all together. (I also recommend reading Snyder’s Decapitation Strike—and checking out and signing up for his Substack.)

In the video below, posted by Right Wing Watch, Pete Hegseth is seen with two commentators advocating for an “educational insurgency” and lauding one aspect of that insurgency, “Classical Christian Schools”, as “boot camps for ‘winning back’ America.”

“Classical Christian Schools” have a local presence—and a local origin. Months or perhaps a year ago I read that our now soon-to-be-former U.S House Representative from eastern Washington (CD5), Cathy McMorris Rodgers, was somehow associated with The Oaks Classical Christian Academy. The Oaks is a private religious school in the southwest corner of the City of Spokane Valley between 22nd and 24th Avenues just east of S Bowdish Road, behind the Valley Fourth Church. The Oaks is an institution that presents itself first as being pedagogically devoted to teaching the medieval “Trivium”: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. So far, so good. That sounds vaguely akin to the curriculum my mother was taught (including Latin) in a small public high school in Wisconsin in the late 1920s. But the curricular underpinning at The Oaks is far more one brand of “Christian” than it is “classical”:

Education is the transfer of culture from one generation to the next. A cultural handoff that removes or marginalizes Jesus Christ— the one who holds all things together—is a handoff that will unravel culture. That's why we start with God's word as the foundation of our educational pursuits.

There are two other “Classical Christian” schools close by, the “Classical Christian Academy” at 4810 N. Ramsey Road in Coeur d’Alene and an apparently allied institution by the same name (and referencing the same website) at 2289 W Seltice Way, Post Falls. The latter school promotes itself as “The only Pre-Kindergarten through 12th grade, 5 day a week classical Christian school serving North Idaho and Spokane families for 30 years.”

The video below that I encourage you to watch benefits from context. The patriarchally-bearded man who starts off by saying “These classical Christian schools are boot camps” is Pastor Toby Sumpter of King’s Cross Church. King’s Cross was established in 2022 in Moscow, Idaho, an apparent metastasis from Christ Church in Moscow. Christ Church is led by Douglas Wilson, pastor, theologian, prolific writer, and the originator and promoter of Classical Christian education (in the 1980s), a takeoff on the broader and less specifically religious “classical education movement.”

Toby Sumpter’s blog, Having Two Legs, is just one piece of the sprawling Douglas Wilson-allied politico-religious enterprise in Moscow, Idaho. Anyone living in Moscow and paying attention is aware of Wilson’s and his followers’ aspirations to take over city government with folks steeped in Wilson’s particular brand of Calvinist Christian Fundamentalism. In Moscow alone not only are there Christ Church, King’s Cross Church and Trinity Reformed Church, but also New Saint Andrews College (founded in 1994) and the Logos School (K-12, founded in 1981), both notable for, among other things, their strictly male governing boards and adherence to Douglas Wilson’s concept of classical Christian education. Logos is the flagship of the Wilson’s concept as applied to elementary education. Both New Saint Andrews and Logos receive their accreditation from Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), established in 1993 by, you guessed it, Douglas Wilson. ACCS has accredited more than 200 classical “Christian” schools in the U.S. For a map click here.

The general flavor of the entire “Classical Christian”, Doug Wilson enterprise, the “Chaos” Wilson sees himself as pitted against, might best be illustrated by the short video on the introductory page of the New Saint Andrews website. I urge you to watch it.

One could deceive oneself into seeing all this as rather benign, perhaps similar to the network of Roman Catholic schools with which we are all familiar, but, before you accept that idea, I urge you to click on and listen to this short segment of Pete Hegseth, Toby Sumpter, and Gabe Rench speaking on Pastor Sumpter’s video podcast, CrossPolitic. Pay attention to the backgrounds.

[You can watch the entire video podcast here. The above short segment starts at 29:45.]

Take particular notice of the knowing chuckles in response to Hegseth’s declaration that “Obviously all of this stuff is metaphorical and all that good stuff.”

Having listened to Hegseth (in the video) and the laughter at the end of it, I cannot help but think of these Classical Christian Academies as Christian versions of fundamentalist muslim madrasahs upon which we were fixated during the war in Afghanistan. The difference is that from our vantage point in a culture with a great deal of exposure to the variety of “Christian” thought, it is easy to consider a “classical Christian” education as somehow natural, while a “classical Muslim” education is seen as culturally threatening.

Hegseth’s “metaphor” comment and laughter that follows it in the video is unsettling—especially from a person nominated to head up the Department of Defense, overseeing the largest military in the entire world and potentially the “yes” man to turning the military against Trump’s idea of “the enemy within.”

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

P.S. Hegseth’s words in the video, “It’s always been the 1, 2, 3 percent,” is a nod to the core belief of the anti-government militia, the “Three Percenters,” that “History itself, for good or ill, is made by determined minorities” and to the unsupported claim that the active figures in the Revolutionary War “never amounted to more than 3% of the colonists.”

P.P.S. Greyfriars Hall, a part of New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, offers a “Masters of Divinity” degree partly characterized by this statement found under “A Band of Brothers,” the last of the seven explanatory statements on the main Greyfriars Hall webpage. The flavor of it seems entirely consistent with Hegseth’s tattoos:

While most of the programs at New Saint Andrews are open to both men and women, Greyfriars Hall is special. Unique even. Greyfriars Hall is for men only.  And not just biological males. The ministerial calling is a masculine calling, demanding strength, fortitude, skillfulness, sober-mindedness, and a touch of citrus. We intend to produce men who have the courage of David, the boldness of the apostles, and the sacrificial joviality of King Lune of Archenland. Our students must master their passions and appetites, manage their households well, and be prepared to fight wolves and defy petty tyrants. Ours is an M. Div. for pirates and merry men.

P.P.P.S. Last, but certainly not least, I commend to you a cautionary quote from Episcopal Priest Barbara Brown Taylor:

Jesus was not killed by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the mind of God and who are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God's will from their own. Temple police are always a bad sign. When chaplains start wearing guns and hanging out at the sheriff's office, watch out. Someone is about to have no king but Caesar.